Real Estate

Living Autobiography #3

by Deborah Levy

'Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A Pandemic. A love story.'

From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final installment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography'

'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer on The Cost of Living

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.

'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.'

'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise... A brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph on The Cost of Living

'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times on The Cost of Living

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Feminism, Biography, Essays, Autobiography, Contemporary

297 pages, Hardcover

First published May 13, 2021

About the author

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)

Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

'If I were asked to name the chief’s benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.'
(Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of Space (1964)

Bachelard’s quote encapsulates the central theme of this third instalment of Deborah Levy’s ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy: our endless capacity of longing, even when one seems to have everything one’s heart desire: ‘So what was I going to do with all this wanting?'

While in Things I Don't Want to Know she reflected on her childhood in South-Africa and motherhood and The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography dealt with rebuilding her life at fifty after having divorced and losing her mother, in Real Estate she writes about a new phase in her life now she soon will be sixty and living alone. Struggling with what very much seems like the (almost) empty nest syndrome, moving between New York, London, Paris, Mumbai and Greece she questions her life, friendships, her writing, motherhood, her longing for a room of her own which takes on the somewhat comical form of her yearning for a grand old house (with an oval fireplace in the form of an ostrich egg) in the Mediterranean with a pomegranate tree in the garden, fountains and wells and mimosa trees.
Pierre Bonnard - The studio at Le Cannet with mimosa

Gradually it dawns to her that more than collecting objects for her imaginary dream house, she is collecting objects and dreams for a parallel life, a life that yet has to be created, an unreal estate much like her writing, in tune with Katherine Mansfield’s observation ‘Would you not like to try all sort of lives – one is so very small – but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she comes to the conclusion that her books are what she will leave behind, not bricks - unlike real estate accessible to all her readers - reminiscent of the words of the Dutch poet Jan J. Slauerhoff Only in my poems can I make my home.

Although she goes through some darker times too, her voice is so impetuous and inspiring she almost made the thought of possibly reaching that turning point within about a decade myself sound appealing, if only for her admirable freedom and wildness of mind (not that I look forward to the moment my youngest leaves the house like Levy’s daughter at the start of the book). Levy generously shares kernels of wisdom with the reader, coming up for instance with this beneficial and liberating thought useful to keep in mind on quite a few occasions in our lives:
'It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves'.

For this generosity she seems to take inspiration from a thought of Georgia O’Keeffe which seems to run as a leitmotif through Levy’s own actions and observations:
‘When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment, I want to give that world to someone else’. (Georgia O’keeffe, 1946)


Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932

Having prior read the first two instalments of Deborah Levy’s ‘Living Autobiography’, I was elated finally finding the third part of it in the local library, gobbling it up already half before arriving back home. This beautiful bright red book turned out the most voluminous of the three and for me also the most enjoyable one – certainly for the first three fifths of it. The tone of it is more gentle and perhaps even more life-embracing than The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography. Again I was particularly charmed by her sense of humour (The story in this book is about a woman wo has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens. So far, I could only speak a few lines from the Paul Éluard poems I was still translating – the dark heart of my stare, the windows deep with shadows flowing – but where is departure gate F26? Almodovar explains ‘To be like a cow without a bell means being lost, without anyone taking notice of you’. I thought I was a bit like a cow without a bell.

Flipping through this book and my notes again, trying to recapitulate impressions and thoughts two months after finishing it and re-reading large chunks of it, I was surprised going through a similar reading experience: from initial rapture on to slight scepticism. The book contains so many brilliant passages and stimulating references I could fill pages and pages with quotations. Levy’s writing is delectably elegant, sprightly and witty and many turns of phrases just ask for a second and third reading to savour them again.


Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Poppy 1927

Tumbling from Woolf (again), Kundera over Borges to Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Duras (again) Marquez, Gertrude Stein, Jane Eyre, Alice in Wonderland, Robert Desnos, Katherine Mansfield, Tagore, Simone de Beauvoir, Éluard, Perec, Apollinaire, Leonora Carrington , Annie Ernaux, Ezra Pound, Gloria Steinem, Elisabeth Hardwick and Rilke, mixing in some art, (Bonnard, Egon Schiele) and film (BB, Bergman) the seamless way Levy intertwines the thoughts of an astounding number of voices in literature and art with her own reflections doesn’t come across as namedropping but as an inspiring responsiveness and sensitivity of the woman’s mind to this company of fine minds and their creations , resulting in a brilliant synthesis of the personal and the vastness of culture that LEE explains marvellously in his magnificently perceptive review.

Almost casually she weaves their words into her life, toying in style with her own frivolity and diva allures(Shoes, bed sheets of turmeric coloured silk with a flippant touch reminding me of
Absolutely Fabulous: I made the spritz with Prosecco, Campari , a dash of tonic and a slice of orange. It was a summer drink, but as Camus said to himself, there was an eternal summer inside me, even when a storm was threatening to topple my building.

However mostly entertaining and amusing, proceeding through the book the marking of memorable or refreshing insights became more rare until almost drying up until the closure of the book – I noticed losing interest reading through her rather rambling musings on the love affairs of friends and her party life. Just like in The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography, I was not entirely comfortable with her more polemical side and her (imho at times slightly facile) take on patriarchy and feminism (for reasons I am still trying to figure out).

Those minor disagreements and quibbles are part and parcel of what makes Levy such a fascinating and beautiful writer. Reading her feels as real and affecting as encountering an old friend of who you easily accept the quirks of, at times a little annoying, making you laugh and irritating you the next moment and who you wouldn’t miss for the world.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh wow.

Deborah Levy doesn't know this, but we are best friends actually. We read the same books. We love the same cities. We have the same need for company, friendship and solitude. We care beyond sanity for our children (long after the children have reached an age when they are perfectly capable of caring for themselves). We navigate the practical aspects of life in the same confused, yet curious way. And we stare at patriarchy and are grown-up enough to raise an eyebrow instead of comforting and cajoling it.

No seriously, of course we are not acquainted and of course I am not delusional enough to think I am her alter ego or best friend. I am the most 'umble fan on the planet, as Uriah Heep might say. But that would of course be a bit of a strange way to redeem myself from my initial hubris. How did I get into this mess? All I wanted to do was write a review of a book that I enjoyed so, so much. I laughed and cried and had a blast.

Because it resonates with everything I feel.

At the end of the story (which obviously is about to go on, beyond the pages), she finds herself standing at a port, waiting for her daughters, thinking about who she may be: an unwritten female character or a character constantly rewriting the script. And she realises she is both.

That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about the mess of being a human in the post-illusion phase of life!

Hope's that thing with the script.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

"That night, in the deep heat of Greece, devoured by mosquitos and reminiscences, I was thinking about all the doors I had closed in my life and what it would have taken to keep them ajar."

I knew I would love this - I loved the first two volumes of this astonishing living autobiography series (though I classify them as criticism as well - but I really loved this. Levy is essential.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

IL COSTO DELLA VITA



Pensavo all’esistenza, a cosa ci rimaneva in mano di una vita. Me l’ero cavata? Chi l’avrebbe stabilito? C’erano stati abbastanza anni felici, abbastanza amore dato e ricevuto? E i libri che avevo scritto erano dei buoni libri? E tutto questo, a che scopo? Ero stata abbastanza vicino alle persone che mi stavano a cuore? Ero felice di vivere da sola? Perché ero ossessionata da case irraggiungibili? Perché continuavo a cercare un personaggio femminile assente? Se non riuscivo a trovarlo nella vita reale, perché non inventarlo sulla pagina?

Non vado molto d’accordo con la narrativa di Deborah Levy – e forse qui mi spiega perché: la sua narrativa è influenzata da David Lynch, che io trovo modello rischioso, da prendere con le pinze (molle?) – ma vado invece molto d’accordo con la sua narrativa memoir, con il primo e questo terzo e ultimo capitolo della sua “autobiografia in movimento”. [per la cronaca, ho volutamente saltato il secondo.]
Qui sa raccontarmi i suoi pensieri e le sue sensazioni e le sue emozioni con acuta analisi e profondità ma senza ricorrere a formule lessicali troppo costruite, affidandosi a una lingua semplice e per così dire quotidiana, ma non per questo meno attenta e curata.



È difficile mantenere l’equilibrio tra fragilità e forza, ma è di questo che siamo fatti.

Sa immergermi in un mondo che è popolato dai suoi colleghi, che lei sa raccontare come facessero tutti parte della stessa comitiva di amici, vuoi Marguerite Duras o Simone de Beauvoir o Paul Eluard: e insieme a scrittori e filosofi e pittori e artisti in genere, sa introdurre un tassista, un portinaio, un pescivendolo, la sua amica di Berlino, o quella norvegese (Agnes) che tra uno spritz e l’altro si toglie le scarpe e si esibisce in una verticale senza smettere di parlare. Il tutto nel salotto della casa londinese di Deborah Levy. E sembrano far tutti parte della stessa compagnia, tutti amici e conoscenti.
Come sa raccontarmi Londra, e Parigi, e Berlino, e Mumbai, e Cape Town, e il Giappone, parte di un mondo unico e collegato, ma anche distinto e diverso.



Donna che ama la gente e la solitudine, non abbandona mai un tono dolce e sempre ironico – fa ridere, davvero, e più di una volta – anche se parla di separazioni e divorzi e vecchiaia e ossessioni e obiettivi non raggiunti, sogni non realizzati, case e dimore più o meno immaginarie, e cibi e ricette, e cose e fatti e idee in apparenza superficiali ma invece sempre ricchi di spunti, di gusto e odore e calore e umanità.

Tutta la scrittura ruota intorno a vedere e osservare cose nuove. A volte è vedere cose nuove in quelle vecchie.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

'It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.'

While reading the latest part of Deborah Levy’s excellent continuing memoir, Real Estate, I kept thinking, as is usually the case when I read Levy (two dozen or so other writers have a similar effect; Geoff Dyer, Nicola Barker, Alan Bennett, Muriel Spark amongst them) that to a large extent I don't mind what Levy wants to discuss or consider and that what I’m really here for, what compels me to turn the pages, is not the incident, narrative concerns or even the fact that I’m genuinely interested in such a fascinating individual’s life – however artfully arranged – but the voice the author has found with which she can talk about her life and her place in it.

Why, though, is Levy’s voice compelling?

Firstly, like all great authorial voices, it’s brilliantly synthesised. It seamlessly marries a philosophical interiority with the universal. So when Levy references Simone de Beauvoir, or Georges Perec, or Lady Gaga, or whoever she wants to employ as a reinforcing element as part of any of her pleasing pop-culture riffs, she does so in an apparently offhand way, while engaging in some kind of prosaic interlude (buying shoes or chairs; boarding a train; cooking a meal) which both collapses the gravity of the cultural reference while elevating the personal act, fusing both in a way that accurately captures ‘real time’ conscious thought (Ali Smith does something very similar). It’s a complicated style which renders (or rescues) throwaway things by conferring upon them the same status as everything else, while making of supposedly lofty things merely a collection of utility symbols with which we might make more sense of existence, belonging to nobody, accessible to all, applicable to whatever takes our fancy.

So while we listen to Levy talk about her crumbling apartment, her ideal home (which exists in her mind and therefore exists for real -- she wants to protect mental spaces and dreams from, above all else, men), her daughters heading off to university or the concierge in her new flat in Paris, and wait for her next insertion of some long-held excerpt or aphorism that might suit a specific moment, we enjoy the contrived elegance of the unfettered raconteur, in a way we absolutely could not in any other way but on the page. The artifice implicit when grafting other people's words onto her own vanishes, since it’s seamlessly apt, affords contributions from sage outsiders no special deference and because she's bold enough to consider herself their equal, and the result is a beautifully working sense of someone both earthbound and ethereal, forced to deal with all kinds of things she’d often rather not, but also revivifying them with a well-deployed juxtaposition and by refusing to accept pretty much all received value systems. All of which makes much more of typewriters and taxi journeys as part of a unifying tapestry.

(Another way of putting this is to say that Levy seems to find the world more fascinating than lovable. While collecting these scenes, I wonder if she enjoys them even nearly as much as she does after the fact, when she can make them her own.)

Secondly, Levy knows that time is a very different matter to the contemplative mind than it is out in the world, and that this compounds the suggestion that everything is inherently interconnected (or that any mind hoping to make sense of a world has to impose such a system), a suggestion that’s crucial to the success of such a style. Showing that this is the case is partly down to the synthesis on a sentence and paragraph level, but also due to her refusal to separate childhood with adulthood (other than parts of an extended and finally condensed sequence), ephemera with the eternal, dream houses with real ones. She works at layering together the strands of a life so that we can better appreciate the constant peculiarity and wonder of day-to-day life (which is at first negotiated and then, later, perhaps years later, finally experienced, or even subject to a constant state of incompletion).

Real Estate makes an infectious, compelling case for building a life at all costs, rather than accepting a much easier, externally created, implicitly dishonest idea of existence. Because Deborah Levy seems very much to be living much more than most people (often with difficulty and moments of doubt and loneliness), and honouring a version of herself she can accept as opposed to manage, this working commentary is never just a matter of information or discovery: it's a manifesto for accepting and even revelling in change and taking zero BS.


Thank you to NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I love reading series out of order, for reasons of "laziness," it is also not the best way to consume content, for reasons of "it's always worse that way."

While I've heard amazing things about the second installment of this trilogy (The Cost of Living), and I'll probably read it someday, this one just...did not work for me.

I wasn't in the right space for this book and coming into it at book 3, on a subject I feel most disconnected from, is odd. I'm 24 years old and I live in America and the chances of myself ever owning real estate are somewhere between the chance I win the lottery and the chance I sprout wings and fly to Neverland.

Reading reviews of this and trying to figure out what I was missing, I found a lot of Deborah Levy devotees, which was a very surreal experience considering I have never heard of her to this point. I swear I'll remedy it, but as of now, I still have no answers re: what I was missing. It felt like Googling the answer to a question and finding every result was in a language I couldn't identify.

That being said, there is a lot of good stuff here, and the connection between real estate / property and the patriarchy is done well (even if I tend to find basic feminist rhetoric like this unsatisfying sometimes. Get more radical!).

But if I never see words "best male friend" again it'll be too soon.

Bottom line: Not you, book, me! I think.


-----------------
pre-review

hate to use a cliché, but...sometimes "it's not you, it's me" just applies.

review to come / 3ish

-----------------
currently-reading updates

starting a series at book 3 just to feel something

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)

clear ur sh*t book 54
quest 24: a book in a series

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's easy to get drawn to looking at a real estate agent's window and dream of the ideal home you might inhabit. In this book Deborah Levy muses upon how she's done this too especially because her “crumbling apartment block on the hill” is far from ideal. But, rather than planning to acquire bricks and mortar, Levy more often muses upon what shape her “unreal estate” might take as well as the homes and possessions which might be included in her “portfolio”. This playfully allows her to imaginatively craft and mould a fictional space and habitation that's not anchored to reality. Moreover, it leads to more searching thoughts upon what it means to inhabit a life through a particular lens; in Levy's case as a writer, a daughter, a mother, a friend, a divorcee and a woman who is about to turn sixty. These autobiographical meditations obviously have a deep personal meaning for the author but they also speak to what it means to be human and the troubling question: how do we inhabit the present moment when we can so often be preoccupied by what we've lost and what we wish to have?

There's a delicious exuberance to Levy's journey as she moves between temporary residences in Mumbai, New York, Paris, London, Berlin and Greece. This takes place over the course of 2018 as she's working on her novel “The Man Who Saw Everything” and it's so compelling to read about the images, themes, places and influences “David Lynch, one of the film directors who had most inspired my approach to fiction” which helped shape that book. The same was true of the previous instalment of Levy's memoirs “The Cost of Living” when she was writing her novel “Hot Milk”. The three volumes of what's been branded Levy's 'Living Autobiography' thus make up a fascinating commentary on the writing process and an invaluable exploration of the influences which fed into the creation of her unique novels. However, I have to admit, I favour reading Levy's memoirs more than the fiction itself which I admire and appreciate but don't love as much as reading about her thought process and endearing experiences. Deep issues to do with art, feminism and humanity are paired with humorous wit and flights of fancy which make the 'Living Autobiography' a delicious and richly enjoyable experience.

Read my full review of Real Estate by Deborah Levy on LonesomeReader

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It was not my real estate, I did not own it, I was renting it, but I owned its moods”.

“Real Estate” is brilliant….
……with beautiful-simplicity….
about….
….home-food-travel-writing-women-(an interest in women characters/and their desires)- and it’s deliciously thought provoking….in the truthful ways Deborah Levy observes life…

Deborah Levy, British novelist, playwright, and poet…. is one of those authors I almost hero-worship…
I admire her work-her sincerely-her subtle funny bone-her opinions-her seriousness-her passion-and her artful ability to write sentences that awaken real experiences to the truth of ourselves.

“Sometimes I would sprinkle sea salt on a wedge sour green tomato and dip it into the peppery emerald olive oil.
It was as if I had struck on something good that was within my reach”.

Like “sun-bleached stones”….
“sea, salt, and sunshine”….
there is so much breathtaking beauty in this living autobiography.

[Fionnuala]

I bought the first episode of Deborah Levy's living autobiography series back in 2013—probably before she had even conceived of it as part of a 'living autobiography'. That first episode, Things I Don't Want to Know, was marketed as a response to George Orwell's essay, Why I Write, which Penguin had reissued in a lovely companion edition to Levy's.

I bought both books at the same time, intending to read them together—and I did read the Orwell but somehow the Levy sank to the bottom of the pile.

In 2018 and 2021, Deborah Levy added two more books to her living autobiography series, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. In the meantime, I'd been reading some autobiographical-type novels by Annie Ernaux, Tove Ditlevson and Claire Louise Bennet, and realised that the three titles in Deborah Levy's autobiography series would fit right in to that reading project. So I dug out her initial slim volume and read about the 'Things' she didn't want to know, the circling of which seemed to help her discover the 'Why' of her own writing, in response to Orwell's book.
Orwell had written, I don't think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in—at least this is true in tumoultous, revolutionary ages like our own—but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck in at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

In Things I don't want to Know, Levy examines many aspects of her experience in order to discover the 'emotional attitude' that informs her writing, but she also looks at the other elements Orwell had deemed essential—political purpose, historical impulse (her childhood love of writing stories), aesthetic enthusiasm (her relationship with the written word) and sheer egoism.

Her political purpose seems to revolve around the difficulties of women writers, and like Virginia Woolf, she's determined to kill off the 'angel of the house', the mother figure. She says: it was becoming clear to me that Motherhood was an institution fathered by masculine consciousness... we had a go at canceling our own desires and found we had a talent for it…
She spent a number of years trying to be a talented mother while trying to be a writer at the same time and experienced huge frustration in both domains, concluding, the world loved the delusion (of the mother) more than it loved the mother.
She goes on to say, Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January never mind all the way to December.

In spite of the challenges, Levy managed to get some books published. I'd read two of her novels in the past, Swimming Home and Hot Milk (as yet unpublished when she was writing Things I don't want to Know) and I was pleased to find little clues in her examination of why and how she writes that helped me better understand the veiled themes in those two novels. I also found echoes of Ernaux, Ditlevson and Bennet in Levy's account of her childhood and her growing relationship with the written word. She had always been determined to be a writer but found it nearly impossible to make a living from writing— 'A Room of her Own' was far away. That is the case with Claire-Louise Bennet too who wrote the final version of her semi-autobiographical account of her reading and writing life, Checkout 19, as recently as 2020 in a room in someone else's house.

Deborah Levy expands on that subject in the second volume of her living autoiography project, The Cost of Living, which she wrote in a friend's garden shed. The shed sounded like a modest version of Virginia Woolf's garden room at Rodmell where her desk still sits today. Levy would set out every day from the cramped high-rise apartment where she lived with her two daughters, and cycle to her friend's garden crossing London's Abbey Road to get there. I mention that area because I have since read her novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, published in 2019, and recognised the setting of the main event of that novel in an episode in The Cost of Living where Levy is knocked of her bike crossing Abbey Road. It's clear that Levy eventually uses many events in her life as triggers for her fiction. About the notebooks she carries everywhere, she tells us: I was always gathering evidence for something I couldn't fathom.

When I finished The Cost of Living, I started the third part of her living autobiography, Real Estate, where her preoccupation with acquiring that elusive 'Room of her Own' continues. A lot of the third book happens in Paris where she gets to live and write in a city centre apartment thanks to a nine-month bursary she won in 2020. Then it's back to the high rise apartment in busy London where another friend's garden shed becomes her writing room for the time being.

But no matter where she writes, Levy's thoughts and reflections are interesting, and I particularly enjoyed the sections on books she's reading. If she writes a fourth volume in her autobiography series, I will read it. And I sincerely hope it will tell of finally getting a room of her own.

[Paula Mota · Rating 5 out of 5]

Misturando-me com as restantes pessoas, pensei se me considerava uma personagem feminina de 60 anos ainda por escrever, à espera da chegada das filhas no ´Flying Cat’. Ou será que me considerava uma personagem feminina de 60 anos que estava permanentemente a rescrever todo o argumento? Era essas duas mulheres ao mesmo tempo.

Quando comecei a ler Deborah Levy, com “Hot Milk”, achei a escrita dela tão fresca e jovial, que nunca suspeitei que tivesse, nessa altura, 57 anos. A verdade é que, como separo quase sempre a arte do artista, raramente procuro os dados biográfico dos autores, no entanto, devido às memórias que Levy tem publicado, sei agora bastante sobre ela e agrada-me muito aquilo que tem optado por revelar sobre o seu passado e o seu presente.
Muito daquilo que valorizo está claramente patente neste livro.
Amizade e companheirismo entre mulheres, mesmo as mais jovens.

Ela parecia muito bela e triste, por isso, para a tornar ainda mais triste, falei-lhe da caneta, da tinta cor de alfarroba, dos 'marrons glacés', do sabonete em forma de cigarra e do postal. Rimo-nos as duas de os presentes dela terem acabado no caixote do lixo.

Citações que dão que pensar.

"A verdade liberta-nos, mas primeiro enfurece-nos". (Gloria Steinem)

"Contaríamos toda a nossa vida, se partilhássemos a história de todas as partes que fechámos, que abrimos, as portas que gostaríamos de reabrir". (Gaston Bachelard)

Factos sobre referências culturais comuns.

Quando Cohen já estava doente, tinha escrito uma bela carta a Marianne, que estava a morrer – sobre como lhe parecia que ele a seguiria em breve. Se ela estendesse a mão, escreveu, conseguiria tocar na dele; desejava-lhe uma boa viagem e amava-a eternamente. Cohen, de idade avançada, fizera a longa viagem até essa carta. Podia ser a melhor coisa que ele tinha escrito, dirigida ao seu passado pessoal e mítico.

Em “Direito de Propriedade”, Levy fala-nos do seu desejo de sedentarismo ao adquirir a casa dos seus sonhos, mas mostra-nos em simultâneo o seu lado nómada como escritora, viajando até à Índia, passando uma temporada numa ilha grega e usufruindo de uma bolsa de estudos em Paris.

O único plano era a minha vila com a sua romãzeira, as mimosas, a lareira em forma de ovo de avestruz e o rio com o barco a remos chamado 'Sister Rosetta'. Não tinha um plano B, mas na vida precisamos de alguns planos B.

No terceiro volume da “Autobiografia Viva”, esta escritora sul-africana, que faz hoje 61 anos e só há pouco tempo começou a ter algum reconhecimento, prova que é culta sem exibicionismo, sensível sem sentimentalismo, irónica sem azedume e até engraçada, porque apesar de se levar a sério como escritora, consegue ver o lado ridículo de muitas situações.

[Grazia · Rating 4 out of 5]

La verità ti rende libera, ma prima ti fa incazzare.(*)

Deborah Levy arriva alle soglie dei sei zero con un divorzio doloroso alle spalle, due figlie che adora, una professione, la scrittura, con cui stenta a sostenersi e un sogno: una casa.

Un banano, il terzo figlio, le lenzuola di seta, un paio di orecchini con pietre che luccicano come smeraldi, il nuoto, una gelatiera, un amico del cuore che come Peter Pan non è in grado di crescere, e i viaggi in case temporanee. Londra, Mumbay (o Mombye), Parigi e la Grecia, i capanni in cui scrive, l'Africa: ma davvero ha un senso la proprietà di un bene immobile? E soprattutto è ciò che può renderci felici?


"I rapporti umani veri e l’immaginazione sono le cose che mi stanno più a cuore e che forse non possono esistere separatamente. Ci avevo messo molto tempo ad abbandonare il desiderio di compiacere chi non si curava del mio benessere e non sapeva circondarmi di affetto. I libri che ho scritto sono miei e i diritti d’autore andranno alle mie figlie. In questo senso, i miei libri sono la mia proprietà. E non è una proprietà privata. Non ci sono cani feroci o guardie al cancello, né cartelli che vietano di tuffarsi, baciare, fallire, provare rabbia o paura, intenerirsi o piangere, innamorarsi della persona sbagliata, impazzire, diventare famosi o giocare sull’erba."


Una volta tanto una scrittrice che mi piacerebbe incontrare e avere come amica.

(*) Steinem

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I own the books that I have written... in this sense, my books are my real estate. They are not private property

In this third part of Levy's sort-of-autobiography, she continues to seduce readers with her wit, her intelligence, her living politics, her unwavering commitment to feminism, her embracing of life, her writer's vision.

From the banana plant in her bathroom to her layering of what it might mean to possess 'real estate': 'are women real estate owned by patriarchy?' or are dreams of that gorgeous big Mediterranean villa merely a stand in for the ever receding desires that keep us alive and make us human?

With perhaps more humour that the previous book and a peripatetic existence that shifts from London to Paris, Berlin to Greece, Levy proves herself - once again - the ideal companion whose casual erudition (yes, thanks, I do need to read Practicalities, and finally get to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) sits comfortably alongside her nights in and out with friends - and yes, I yearned for an invite to her 60th birthday party at that hip Parisian club!

Warm, wise, creative, strikingly non-judgmental, with a self-awareness and sense of self that are enviable, and with a writing style that is elegant as well as intimate and revealing, Levy is one of my icons.

Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the 2021 Christopher Isherwood (and LA Times) Prize for Autobiographical Prose

I own the books that I have written and bequeath the royalties to my daughters. In this sense, my books are my real estate. They are not private property. There are no fierce dogs or security guards at the gate and there are no signs forbidding anyone to dive, splash, kiss, fail, feel fury or fear or be tender or tearful, to fall in love with the wrong person, go mad, become famous or play on the grass.

This is the third volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series (after “Things I Don’t Want to Know” and “The Cost of Living”), this was published in 2021, two years after her Booker longlisting for “The Man Who Saw Everything”.

The book opens in London in January 2018. The author is approaching sixty and over the last few years has gained a degree of (in modern literary writing terms) commercial success, but it still conscious that compared to writers of previous generations (some of whom bought large houses from their success) or some of her contemporaries (with paid off mortgages and second homes) she lacks a grand old house of her own where she can live and work and write. Instead she builds the house both in her imagination and by starting to accumulate possessions for it. At the same time he real flat is about to become a one person home as her younger daughter sets out for university.

She also reflects on how females – both characters in books and real women, particularly married with children, are in effect written out of their own story – this in turn leads her to reflect on whether women are “real estate owned by the patriarchy”.

And these two themes around different types of real estate interleave throughout the book (whose chapters are set in different cities – London, New York, Paris, Greece, Mumbai, Berlin) giving it perhaps more of a coherence of theme than the first two novels, even while at the same time it has much of the same writing style and underlying themes (motherhood, femininity, the patriarchy, the writing life) and a developing group of characters from the second volume.

Each of the volumes in the trilogy follows two years after one of Levy’s novels and there are links and references in the previous volumes to the relevant novel – but the links to “The Man Who Saw Everything” are much more extensive and explicit here – which I particularly enjoyed as it is my favourite of Levy’s novel and one I read and re-read and discussed at length with Goodreads friends.

When it became clearer to me that the main male character in The Man Who Saw Everything was going to live simultaneously in different points in time, I found that it was so technically hard to melt time in a work of literature, I had to write in all time zones.

To work is to live without dying. Rilke

I was creating a male character who literally was trying to find a way of living without dying. He was running out of time. There were spectres, historical and personal, coming out to play in what remained of his life. He himself would become a spectre three seconds after the very last line in the book. There were spectres in the shadows of my own life too: childhood, Africa, love, loneliness, ageing, my mother, all the unreal estate in my property portfolio.

A wonderful end to an outstanding trilogy.

My thanks to Hamish Hamilton, Penguin for ARCs (and the other two volumes in the series) via NetGalley

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Organized around musings on Levy’s dream house and what she would like it to be like, this concluding volume draws onto themes explored in the previous books and works as a conclusion in a way that I found highly, highly satisfying. There are few writers whose prose and narrative structure mean that I will read whatever they put out and will enjoy myself even if I do not always agree with their political points. Levy is this good.

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with the other two parts of Levy's 'Living Autobiography' series (which sadly is allegedly ending with this volume, although I hope the author changes her mind about that in the ensuing years), this is an amazing synthesis of some rather profound musings with the details of a life lived well and thoughtfully. For me, she joins in a triumvirate with Ali Smith and Rachel Cusk of authors (perhaps not so coincidentally all female), who embody what I love most about writing, although I can't quite articulate why. Levy can - and often does - write about fairly mundane incidents, but in a way that makes them come alive and make one think about one's own existence and place in the world. What more can one ask for in a reading experience?

Since I am woefully inadequate in explaining just why I love Levy (and I have read virtually everything she's written, except her plays, which I just find incomprehensible), and the wonders of this book in particular, I am just going to be lazy and direct your attention to an incredibly erudite explication of such by my good friend, Lee: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., who does a much better job of it than I can.

My sincere and grateful thanks to Netgalley and Bloomsbury for the ARC in exchange for this honest and enthusiastic review.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

”…you never know what a woman really wants because she’s always being told what she wants.”

The final volume of Deborah Levy’s impressive, compelling ‘living autobiography’ as with earlier instalments is partly sparked by another piece of writing, this time Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Levy’s still reassembling her life after divorce, now in her late fifties, her income’s precarious and she’s living in a crumbling, London apartment building yet overwhelmed by fantasy images of the perfect house and the perfect existence. But she’s not just thinking of real estate in concrete terms, she spirals out from that to consider it as a metaphor for women’s lives: women as ‘real estate’ in a patriarchal system, their days, their desires, every inch of their domestic space, all too often dominated by men; the male authors that erase or ignore the desires of their female characters and the representation of older women condemned at best to bland likeability or at worst aging, surplus grotesques; the women she meets who're overshadowed by their husbands or partners - sparked by the boasts of an author at a literary festival that at least he can count on going home to warm slippers prepared by his wife. Seemingly stray thoughts lead her to James Baldwin’s years in France, his house there a refuge from the racism and homophobia he experienced, the transformation of domestic space into political space. I say ‘seemingly stray’ because the way Levy’s organising her thoughts can seem rambling, anecdotal and randomly associative when, in fact, she’s slowly weaving a carefully-considered essay/meditation on women, aging and the process of writing.

My description of this so far might suggest Levy’s focus is on the oppressed and oppressive but she’s equally invested in exploring ways to go against the script, to fight against the system,

“Never again did I want to sit at a table with heterosexual couples and feel that women were borrowing the space. When that happens, it makes landlords of their male partners and the women are their tenants.”

Levy’s commitment to rebellion’s encapsulated by her discussion of Leonora Carrington’s wonderful novel The Hearing Trumpet a favourite of a friend in her 80s. A friend who’s an inspiration for Levy, an example of how to be alone and grow old without conforming to society’s expectations of women, the space they should inhabit and how they should inhabit it at each stage of their lives.

I feel quite odd about the prospect of leaving Levy behind, I’ve never been tempted by her fiction but I’ve enjoyed these autobiographical pieces immensely, the unexpected shifts between the mundane, the deeply personal and the more literary or political; her distinctive voice; the way she relates aspects of her experiences back to the books she’s loved or found intriguing; and the sense of being witness to someone working through what she thinks about her past and what she wants for her future.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began this review and then happened on Ilse’s typically exhilarating review. Follow her, friend her. Be inspired by her. So I will be uncharacteristically short:

Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is the third in her series of what she calls a Living Autobiography, and it is the liveliest and funniest and most engaging of the three books. The first, Things I Don’t Want to Know, is about her childhood in South Africa and England; The Cost of Living is about her divorce and the death of her mother, and this third is about facing sixty, trying to make a home. It’s in part a (feminist) response to George Orwell in “Why I Write,” and also a response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

“I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.”

“The house with the pomegranate tree was my major acquisition. In this sense, I owned some unreal estate. The odd thing was that every time I tried to see myself inside this grand old house, I felt sad. It was as if the search for home was the point, and now that I had acquired it and the chase was over, there were no more branches to put in the fire.”

“I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.”

The tone of this volume is lighter, more playful. A central event she riffs off is a meeting with a famous film producer, who asks her to make a list of the central characters in a proposed film script. Over time, she begins to see that the “real estate” that is home for her is one she imagines in her fictions. What happens through the three volumes is her quoting the central characters/authors who have influenced her, including Duras, De Beauvoir, and in this one, she has in mind always Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. As opposed to the first two books where she rarely mentions any males, rarely seems to smile (hey, divorce and death are hard, of course) here she hangs with My Best Male Friend, her friend since youth, who helps her conceptualize her life post-sixty.

I liked reading all three short books but I have this feeling I would have liked them all better had I seen her life through her fiction, which I have yet to read. I think I'll read Swimming home this year.

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Levy has a beautiful way at recounting moments in life that to the average person would be significant, but they are moments that are rather foundational to understanding all the questions she poses in this final instalment of her memoir trilogy. I suppose we are all striving to find our perfect home, whatever that may be, and here we see how every moment and conversation in our life becomes part of our real estate. Home is built inside from every turbulence, peace, and love making we experience. Thank you Levy for such a beautiful series!!!!

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

sorry joan didion, but deborah levy is MY creative nonfiction it girl <3

[Britta Böhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part three of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography - either this will entirely be your thing or not. She's reflecting on her 50s and the cusp of her 60s, no remaining longterm romantic relationships, her friends are international and her daughters have left the roost for the most part. Some people in her life are critical of her seeming desire to be alone! She is pondering what it would mean to own her own place beyond her writing shed, so there's a touch of Woolf to it. Since this time period is more recent, there is also interesting context to her most recent two novels. What I like is how she moves between conversations to books on her shelves to ruminations.

[Bianca thinksGRsucksnow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been busy with renovations and other things so I haven't done much reading. I had to make time to listen to this audiobook, as I'd been meaning to read the three books in this memoir of living for some time.

Real Estate is a meditation on owning real estate or just aspiring to own some to call your own. As she approaches her 60th birthday, Levy is pondering about aging, loneliness, her past relationships, and writing.

The writing is beautiful and honest, without airing the dirty laundry. I like that.

I'm looking forward to reading the other two books, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost Of Living.

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I wait for thoughts on Real Estate to materialise out of thin air (will probably never happen, damn weather) here is a little story in the form of anagrams for you.

Easter Tale

Ale taster 'E',
estate earl,
stale eater,
treats eel a
real tea set;
later tease-
s Al E. Treet, a
tea-stealer.

[casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was so amazing i want to hear her thoughts forever

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the couple of days before I read Real Estate, I took the time to re-visit the first two parts of Levy’s Living Autobiography (“Things I Don’t Want To Know” and “The Cost Of Living”). If, like me, you are a fan of Levy’s writing, these three books are a wonderful collection. Each one could be read separately, but they all build on some similar themes and work well together as a set. In each one, we spend time with Levy in a particular period in her life.

Here, we follow Levy as she approaches her sixtieth birthday. She is at a stage in life where her marriage has broken down and now her two daughters are moving into adult life and leaving home, so she suddenly finds herself contemplating living on her own for the first time in many, many years. She begins to long for a new home (new real estate), she is "collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made”.

I love the passages where Levy lets rip. For instance, this on the book’s title when she imagines having a housekeeper in her dream house and the life she will live. Her housekeeper says:

Your soup is ready. I have fed your wolves and prepared the smoking pipe with your desired brand of tobacco. By the way, madame (my housekeeper’s lips were stained from the raspberries they had devoured for lunch), I note you are thinking about Real Estate. The word ‘Real’ derives from the Latin word ‘Rex’, meaning royal. ‘Real’ also means ‘king’ in Spanish, because kings used to own all the land in their kingdoms. For Lacan, the Real is everything that cannot be said. It has nothing to do with reality. Is there anything else you require before I run my bath and listen to Lana del Rey?

In this period of her life, we move with Levy from London to New York to London to Mumbai to London to Paris to Berlin to Paris to London to Greece. There’s the narrative of a life being lived (it IS an autobiography, after all) but it is surrounded by Levy’s thoughts on motherhood, ageing, parenthood, writing, creativity and patriarchy (plus others). These are themes that run through all three books.

One of the things I love about reading these books is the way an episode in her life will remind Levy of something or make her think about a specific topic but then that idea will join with all the others floating around in the book and become another motif that she can pluck out of the air 50 pages later then again, then again, then again bu mixed with another idea and then again mixed with other ideas. All this makes the whole thing a delight to read.

The other thing that makes this book (in fact, all three books) so much fun for Levy fans is the insights into her writing. In the first two books, we learned quite a bit about Swimming Home and Hot Milk. Here, there is more focus on The Man Who Saw Everything., so we read comments like

When it became clearer to me that the main male character in The Man Who Saw Everything was going to live simultaneously in different points in time…

And we learn about the inspiration for the ylang-ylang fragrance that plays a significant role in that book.

I could write a lot more about this book. I highlighted literally dozens of quotes, some for their beauty (e.g. Can we accept that writing is sacred and scared and it’s scarred as well…), some for their observations (this on the birth of Athena: Their daughter, Athena, the girl child, springs from his head dressed in full armour, defended and ready for war. That was the patriarchal script written for Athena. It is a sad way to be born: armoured and ready for war.) and some for the possible explanations of some of the reasons why I like Levy’s writing so much (this on the nightclub Silencio: Every room was designed by David Lynch, one of the film directors who had most inspired my approach to fiction).

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley of this wonderful book.

[Dannii Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third instalment in Levy's Living Autobiography series, where each instalment chronicles her thoughts, struggles, and life-changes, during the small space of time it took to write them.

I felt more distanced from this third book than the previous two but that is merely due to my personal history, as Levy's astounding penmanship and astute observations remained intact. This dealt initially with feelings of displacement and also heavily featured her family. The previous instalments have focused, it felt to me, more on her writing and her internal struggles. These topics were ones I felt I could relate to more, but that does not in any way mean I disliked getting a better understanding of Levy's home life, here.

Levy also continued to construct a series of compelling philosophical arguments and highlighted them alongside a political focus, her personal day-to-day life, and the emotions that go alongside it all. All of these aspects colluded to ensure this another book that transcended the confines of the autobiography genre and also made it another moving and powerful creation.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the author, Deborah Levy, and the publisher, Hamish Hamilton, for this opportunity.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book; I loved Levy's voice; I want to spend all my time in her (literary) company.

This was the first book I was able to get, so, even though it's the last book in a trilogy, I read it first. Now I've gone back and am reading #1. After I finish her "working autobiographies" (her name for these books) I'm going to read her novels.

Maybe some of it is reading the journey of an older woman post-divorce making a life she hadn't expected to have to make (I'm even older than she is but I was about her age when I separated from my husband). She is close to her two grown (young adult) daughters and I am close to my adult children. She has a voice that is similar to the one in my own head but different enough to make it interesting and give me new perspectives.

Smart, and likable.

[nikita · Rating 2 out of 5]

Levy is a talented writer, and she presents us with some intriguing and relatable musings on feminism accompanied by delightful descriptions of food/friends/places. Unfortunately, I found it incredibly difficult to get through this series without constantly cringing at the abundance of white privilege and self-indulgence. At times it feels a lot like an angsty teen's diary, as if she is constantly trying to convince herself (and the reader) that she is "Not like other girls". She builds her own shelves, cooks "exotic" foods like "dhal (very cheap)", sleeps on sheets the color of turmeric, and buys African masks that "embod(y) psychologies and rituals [she does] not yet culturally understand" (yet decorates her apartment with them anyways).

I understand how many people would enjoy this series, there are some great thoughts and astute observations, but I simply have no desire to sift though the pages of excess
her incessant need to recreate the guava ice cream she had once in India,

her daughter singing Taylor Swift while wearing the North African robe she bought for her,

a description of an "African American" woman(whom she passes on the street)'s outfit, comparing her to the caffeine+sugar rush from a sweetened iced coffee, by declaring her an "Everything Rush"; a term she coined a few lines earlier,

or how when at a literary festival in Mumbai, when asked to simply do a thumbs-up for a group photo, she refused because she "did not feel this was the right look for (her)" because of its association with "authoritarian leaders parading their erect white thumbs for the world's media"

or when she applies multiple essential oils to her pillow in an airplane cabin, someone complains of the smell, so the air hostess must relay the complaint to her, but apparently also "applauds her for turning the cabin into a temple of delight". Furthermore, she believes the man that complained should be thanking her because she noted that he was now "snoring loudly with his mouth wide open". Ok.

and quotes like: "Any cleaner getting up at dawn to sweep offices, railway stations, schools, hospitals, will be familiar with this sort of thinking. She knows she has to be stronger than her most fearful thoughts, stronger than her exhaustion." or "This was the first time I saw something of Mumbai: the market stalls laid out on the pavements, piles of green beans,... ginger, turmeric...an electric fan balanced precariously on a wooden box..." (Because the literary festival she had just been at was not "Mumbai").] to get to them.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

At one point in this book the author includes a quote from Marguerite Duras, the gist of which is that she considered most books to be too organised, too prim and as a result lacked the true voice of the author. Well, I think Levy has taken this to heart in her production of this, the third volume of her memoirs. Whilst not a loose stream of consciousness rant – it feels more structured than that - it’s certainly a monologue that attempts to capture her true thoughts, feelings and wishes as she approaches and passes her sixtieth birthday.

Her youngest daughter is about to leave the flat they’d shared in North London to attend university in the North East of England. Levy will be thereafter be living alone for the first time in many years. Does she want to continue to live in this flat, with it crumbling, decrepit corridors? No, she wants a house close to water so she can swim every day and has one or two specific ideas regarding what she’d have in the house. But then she has a rather broader view of real estate than most: it comprises everything that she values, including a plant considered by her two daughters to be their mother’s third child. And so for much of this book the background narrative is that of her considered thoughts on exactly what is (and what it isn’t) she wants in her life from this point on.

In the few years covered in this book, Levy ruminates on the challenges of writing, spends time in New York, Berlin, Paris and Greece and reveals just how much she misses her late mum. But there’s more than that, she has many wry and interesting observations on life – many from what I’d consider left field – and uses quotes from a wide range literary sources to help illustrate her points. On the matter of acquiring a future life partner she muses that there is nobody that can make you happy, you must take care of yourself.

It’s a thought provoking and in many ways illuminating book, a short read which carries a significant punch. I’ve enjoyed working through these three volumes and it does make me feel like revisiting some of her novels that I’ve previously read – this time with fresh and probably more informed eyes.

My thanks to Penguin UK for supplying a copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Levy's writing style and loved the first two memoirs in this loose series. This one though didn't really work for me - I found the conversations around wanting to buy a house and all her rich friends with their second houses, and her flat in london... just ended up feeling all a bit privileged and upper middle class.

also this just went from one random story to the next, from paris, to greece, from banana plants to Leonard Cohen.... and they were kinda a bit banal.